Thursday, January 2, 2014

Shortly
before independence, Mahatma Gandhi asked Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to step down
as candidate for the Congress leadership and hence for the upcoming job of
Prime Minister. It was the only way to foist Jawaharlal Nehru on India, as
Sardar Patel would easily have gotten a majority behind him. Yet, Nehru was overtly
Westernized and known to be in favour of industrialization and modernization,
while Gandhi was reputedly opposed to this approach.

Was
Patel’s outlook not more capable, more popular and more Gandhian? With the
benefit of hindsight, we can moreover say that the choice for Nehru ultimately
led to the festering Kashmir problem, to proverbial socialist poverty, and to
the communalization of the polity. Yet, when Gandhi made his fateful pro-Nehru
move, he tried to minimize its importance and laughed it off: “Jawaharlal is
the only Englishman in my camp.” This was a most curious reason, as Gandhism
was popularly taken to imply a choice for native culture and against
Westernization. But then, Gandhi himself was not really a votary of Gandhism.

Backwardness

Superficially,
of course, with his spinning-wheel, he seemed to be the colourful paragon of
Indian swadeshi (native produce)
ideals. But there already, the problem starts. Indian culture had never opted
for willful backwardness. In its time, the Harappan culture played a vanguard
role in industry and trade. When you compare the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
you find decisive technological progress: Arjuna has abandoned Rama’s bow and
arrow (not to speak of Hanuman’s mace, the primitive weapon par excellence) for
a sword and a chariot. Jokes about Hindus highlight their uptight and greedy
nature, but none would question their entrepreneurial skills. Indeed, Indian
emigrants to more libertarian countries, and now also the native Indians
relatively freed from socialist controls, have surprised everyone with their
economic success.

It is the
British who de-industrialized India, thus dooming it to backwardness and
poverty. In order to give some justification to their policy, they fostered the
idea of a “spiritual” India, uninterested in material progress. Gandhi proved
to be a faithful propagator of this British notion. He also tapped into an
anti-modern fashion in the West, where some intellectuals got tired of
industrialization and set up autarchic communes.

Although Gandhi
led the Freedom Movement, he was also a British loyalist. He volunteered for
military service in the Boer War and in the suppression of the Zulu rebellion,
and recruited for the British war effort in the First World War. From 1920
onwards, as the formal leader of the Indian National Congress, he got crowds
marching but didn’t achieve much in reality. He let his enthusiastic foot-soldiers
down. Initially, it was still possible to be both pro-British and pro-Indian,
e.g. Annie Besant’s Home Rule League aimed for autonomy (swaraj) within the British Empire, on a par with “grown-up” states
like Canada and Australia. In 1929, however, Congress redefined its goal as
“complete independence” (purna swaraj).
Mass agitation highlighted and popularized this goal, but Gandhi’s subsequent
conclusion of a far less ambitious pact with Viceroy Lord Irwin betrayed his
own pro-British feelings, not shared by his disappointed younger followers. In
1927, he had indeed blocked a similar resolution for full independence,
pleading for dominion status instead. From 1942 onwards, as India’s
independence was being prepared, he was relegated to the sidelines. When Prime
Minister Clement Attlee finally announced the transfer of power, the memory of Gandhi’s
mediagenic mass campaigns was only a “minimal” factor, as he confided later in
an interview.

Being a
loyalist of a world-spanning empire, Gandhi was at least immune to a rival
Western fashion: nationalism. His opponent Vinayak Damodar Savarkar took
inspiration from small nations seeking their nationhood, like the Czechs and
Irish wanting independence, or Germany and Italy forging their unity, as exemplified
by Savarkar’s translation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s book championing Italian
nationalism. His “Hindu nation” was numerous enough, but centuries of
oppression had given it the psychology of a defensive nation. Gandhi, by
contrast, had the outlook of the multinational empire. That helps explain why in
1920 he could become enamoured of the Caliphate movement, defending the Muslim
empire from which the Arabs had just freed themselves. It certainly explains
his incomprehension for the founding of Hindu nationalist organizations (Hindu
Mahasabha 1922, RSS 1925) in reaction against his tragicomical Caliphate
agitation.

Universalism

In his
youth, Gandhi had been influenced by Jain and Vaishnava saints, but as an
adult, he mainly took inspiration from Christian writers like Leo Tolstoi and befriended
Westerners like architect Hermann Kallenbach. His name was elevated into an
international synonym of non-violent agitation by American journalists. It is
logical to suspect a direct transmission from the West for his voguish doctrines,
like this political non-violence or his slogan of sarva-dharma-samabhava, “equal respect for all religions”.

The
marriage of non-violence and political agitation seems an innovative
interpretation of Hinduism’s old virtue of Ahimsa.
But Hinduism had tended to keep ascetic virtues separate from Raja Dharma, a politician’s duties. When
the Jain Oswal community decided to opt for uncomproming Ahimsa, it gave up its Kshatriya status and adopted Vaishya dharma,
the bloodless duties of the entrepreneur. The personal practice of virtues was always
deemed different from the hard action that politics sometimes necessitates. From
the start, Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence was tinged with the Christian
ideal of self-sacrifice, of being killed rather than killing. Not that many
Christian rulers had ever applied this principle, but at least it existed in
certain Gospel passages such as the Sermon on the Mount. When, during the
Partition massacres, Gandhi told Hindu refugees to go back to Pakistan and
willingly get killed, he did not rely on any principle taught in the wide
variety of Hindu scriptures. But in certain exalted Christian circles, it would
be applauded.

This is
even clearer in Gandhi’s religious version of what Indians call “secularism”,
i.e. religious pluralism. This was a growing value in the modern anglosphere. Within
Christianity, Unitarianism had set out to eliminate all doctrinal points deemed
divisive between Christians, even the fundamental dogma of the Trinity. On the
fringes, the Theosophists and Perennialists sought common ground between
“authentic” Christianity, Vedicism and “esoteric” Buddhism as expressions of
the global “perennial” truth. Gandhi’s contemporary Aldous Huxley juxtaposed
the goody-goody points of all religions in a book aptly titled The Perennial Philosophy. Outside the
West, this trend was imitated by progressive circles, such as the Bahai reform
movement in Iran, harbinger of modern values like egalitarianism and
internationalism (e.g. promotor of Esperanto, the linguistic embodiment of the globalist
ideal). In India, the British-influenced Brahmo Samaj and Ramakrishna Mission
had promoted the idea of a universal religion transcending the existing
denominations. Hinduism had always practised pluralism as a pragmatic way to
live and let live, but these movements turned it into an ideological dogma.

Syrupy

So, Gandhi’s
religious pluralism, today his main claim to fame, was essentially the transposition of a Western ideological
fashion. Of Vivekananda, it is routinely claimed that he was besieged by
alternative religionists as soon as he set foot in the USA, and that this
influence coloured his view and presentation of Hinduism. Gandhi’s worldview
too was determined by Western contacts, starting in his student days in
England, when he frequented vegetarian eateries, the meeting-place par
excellence of various utopians and Theosophists. It must be emphasized that he
borrowed from one current in Western culture while ignoring another, viz. the
critical questioning of religion. Historical Bible studies had reduced Jesus to
a mere accident in human history, neither the Divine incarnation worshiped by Christians
nor the spiritual teacher venerated by many Hindus. In the pious Mahatma, this
very promising rational approach to religion was wholly absent.

Hindus
themselves are partly to blame, having long abandoned their own tradition of philosophical
debate, embracing sentimental devotion instead. This has led to a great
flowering of the arts but to a decline in their power of discrimination. Great
debaters like Yajnavalkya or Shankara would not be proud to see modern Hindus
fall for anti-intellectual soundbites like “equal respect for all religions”. Very
Gandhian, but logically completely untenable. For example, Christianity
believes that Jesus was God’s Son while Islam teaches that he was merely God’s
spokesman: if one is right, the other is wrong, and nobody has equal respect
for a true and a false statement (least of all Christians and Muslims
themselves). Add to this their common scapegoat Paganism, in India represented
by “idolatrous” Hinduism, and the common truth of all three becomes
unthinkable. It takes a permanent suspension of the power of discrimination to
believe in the syrupy Gandhian syncretism which still prevails in India.

The
Mahatma’s outlook was neither realistic nor Indian. Not even the Jain doctrine
of Anekantavada, “pluralism”, had
been as mushy and anti-intellectual as the suspension of logic that is
propagated in India under Gandhi’s name. It could only come about among post-Christian
Westerners tired of doctrinal debates, and from their circles, Gandhi
transplanted it to India.

5 comments:

@koenraad elst Have a look at this article. http://www.newslaundry.com/2013/12/case-in-point/. Apparently only hindu right wingers can be arrested and put to trial, even though the court sees otherwise. This Sheeba aslam fehmi cliams to be a feminist and a muslim. To me they are contradicory and an oxymoron. would you give some thought to this and enlighten us,your readers about it.

The Mahatma delayed India's freedom by his peculiar politics. Everytime he started a major agitation such as non-copoeration, or Khilafat, or Dandi March or Quit India, the result was unleashing more violence.

Read my following blog series on a survey of partition of India, and sources of Gandhi's Ahimsa Politics. It is clearly un-Hindu.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.